When Nikolae Iorga, in the 1930s, chose to propose the interpretive framework of "Byzantium after Byzantium," a concept that was also favored in modern Greek historiography, he was actually correcting some problematic points of the Romanian national past in relation to the Slavs.
However, the position regarding the continuity between the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, as the term "Byzantium after Byzantium" implies, formed the basis for divergent narratives to emerge in many Balkan historiographies throughout the 19th century—divergent compared to the continuity framework that had been painstakingly shaped by the main representatives of each national historiographical norm.
It is particularly interesting that these divergences were produced mainly in the intellectual environment of Constantinople-Byzantium. Thus, `Byzantium after the Nation` does not merely represent an attempt to comparatively address the bipolar relationship of norm and deviation in the cases of Greek, Bulgarian, and Albanian historiography; nor does it only seek to ascertain the weight of its post-theoretical legacy in the cases of Romanian and Turkish historiography.
In the end, it represents an attempt to identify the influence of the imperial model in shaping national states in the Balkans, that is, the framework of `continuity of empires` over the framework of `national continuity`.
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
